Counting number of words in a file

You can use a Scanner with a FileInputStream instead of BufferedReader with a FileReader. For example:-

File file = new File("sample.txt");
try(Scanner sc = new Scanner(new FileInputStream(file))){
    int count=0;
    while(sc.hasNext()){
        sc.next();
        count++;
    }
System.out.println("Number of words: " + count);
}

I would change your approach a bit. First, I would use a BufferedReader to read the file file in line-by-line using readLine(). Then split each line on whitespace using String.split("\\s") and use the size of the resulting array to see how many words are on that line. To get the number of characters you could either look at the size of each line or of each split word (depending of if you want to count whitespace as characters).

This is just a thought. There is one very easy way to do it. If you just need number of words and not actual words then just use Apache WordUtils

import org.apache.commons.lang.WordUtils;

public class CountWord {

public static void main(String[] args) {    
String str = "Just keep a boolean flag around that lets you know if the previous character was whitespace or not pseudocode follows";

    String initials = WordUtils.initials(str);

    System.out.println(initials);
    //so number of words in your file will be
    System.out.println(initials.length());    
  }
}